Third Party Vendor blamed for 911 outage in ND & MN

Minnesota officials say a third party vendor working on a 911 system caused a widespread 911 service failure in eastern North Dakota and Minnesota.

Fargo, Grand Forks and Twin Cities–area cities scrambled to broadcast alternative emergency phone numbers through social media and other means during the hour long outage Wednesday.

A CenturyLink spokesman says that the company is investigating the outage.

The Federal Communications Commission fined CenturyLink $16 million for a six–hour 911 outage in 2014 that affected 10 million people in Minnesota, Washington and North Carolina.